Yandex buys Russian movie review site

The company logo is seen on the headquarters building of Yandex company, in Moscow June 14, 2012.

Reuters/Maxim Shemetov

MOSCOW Russian internet group Yandex said on Tuesday it had acquired KinoPoisk, the largest Russian-language website dedicated to movies, in a move to further enhance its search.

Search services are the essence of Yandex, which in Russia leads the world's top search engine Google with a market share of more than 60 percent and derives the bulk of its revenues from text-based advertising.

Yandex said in a statement that it would integrate the team behind KinoPoisk, while the service will remain available at its current domain, kinopoisk.ru.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

KinoPoisk, previously owned by founders Vitaliy Tatsiy and Dmitry Sukhanov as well as France's Allocine, has a monthly audience of 18.6 million users, Yandex said citing comScore Media Metrix. It contains more than 100 million movie ratings with 3 million new ones being generated every month.

Yandex's interest was earlier reported by Itar-Tass news agency, which said this month the deal was worth "tens of millions of dollars". Yandex declined to comment.